"disney" entries

Four short links: 1 January 2015

Four short links: 1 January 2015

Wearables Killer App, Open Government Data, Gender From Name, and DVCS for Geodata

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 1, 2015
  1. Killer App for Wearables (Fortune) — While many corporations are still waiting to see what the “killer app” for wearables is, Disney invented one. The company launched the RFID-enabled MagicBands just over a year ago. Since then, they’ve given out more than 9 million of them. Disney says 75% of MagicBand users engage with the “experience”—a website called MyMagic+—before their visit to the park. Online, they can connect their wristband to a credit card, book fast passes (which let you reserve up to three rides without having to wait in line), and even order food ahead of time. […] Already, Disney says, MagicBands have led to increased spending at the park.
  2. USA Govt Depts Progress on Open Data Policy (labs.data.gov) — nice dashboard, but who will be watching it and what squeeze will they apply?
  3. globalnamedata — We have collected birth record data from the United States and the United Kingdom across a number of years for all births in the two countries and are releasing the collected and cleaned up data here. We have also generated a simple gender classifier based on incidence of gender by name.
  4. geogig — an open source tool that draws inspiration from Git, but adapts its core concepts to handle distributed versioning of geospatial data.